<?php
/**
 * <https://y.st./>
 * Copyright © 2019 Alex Yst <mailto:copyright@y.st>
 * 
 * This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
 * it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
 * the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
 * (at your option) any later version.
 * 
 * This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
 * but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
 * MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
 * GNU General Public License for more details.
 * 
 * You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
 * along with this program. If not, see <https://www.gnu.org./licenses/>.
**/

$xhtml = array(
	'<{title}>' => 'Improvements to <code>minestats</code>',
	'takedown' => '2017-11-01',
	'<{body}>' => <<<END
<img src="/img/CC_BY-SA_4.0/y.st./weblog/201905/16.jpg" alt="Frilly, pink flowers" class="framed-centred-image" width="800" height="480"/>
<section id="diet">
	<h2>Dietary intake</h2>
	<p>
		I had 133 grams of cereal and 209 grams of soy milk for breakfast.
		For lunch, I had two veggie dogs with the remainder of my cashew sauce.
		For dinner, I had spaghetti and cashew sauce I&apos;d set aside yesterday, which totalled 581 grams.
		I ate the remainder of a bag of jalapeño pretzels at the $a[EUGLUG] meeting - there weren&apos;t many left - but I skipped the slushy this week.
	</p>
</section>
<section id="religion">
	<h2>Religious study</h2>
	<p>
		The missionaries came over this morning.
		First, I confirmed that the church does indeed believe that marriage is between a man and a woman.
		I then said that homophobia is evil, so if they believe in that doctrine, they&apos;re evil, and if their gods want them to believe in that doctrine, their gods are evil.
		They seemed much less phased by that than I&apos;d planned.
		I then asked about what I&apos;d read online about getting into the celestial kingdom requiring marriage.
		They&apos;ve finally explained that the celestial kingdom is divided into three subkingdoms.
		I knew that from what Summer had told me, but the missionaries hadn&apos;t mentioned it yet.
		This makes a total of five heavens.
		Anyway, getting into the highest of the celestial kingdoms, known as exaltation, requires a marital binding in one of the temples.
		So yes.
		You&apos;ve got to get married, though you also have to get married in the correct way.
	</p>
	<p>
		So I showed them my $a[ID] with the non-binary designation.
		I then made the claim that according to both medical science and the state of Oregon, I&apos;m neither a man nor a woman.
		That was actually only half true, but I said it to get the point across.
		The point being, of course, that they aren&apos;t going to get anywhere by trying to box me into the binary.
		It&apos;s true that medical science backs up the separation between sex and gender and it&apos;s true that they back up the concept of non-binary genders.
		If you looked at my brain in an $a[MRI], it would be a mix of a man&apos;s brain and a woman&apos;s brain.
		However, the Oregon $a[DMV] simply doesn&apos;t require citizens have their sex on their $a[ID] any more.
		They don&apos;t actually make any claims about my gender and are simply not requiring my to report my sex to everyone I end up having to show my $a[ID] to.
	</p>
	<p>
		Anyway, one of the missionaries asked me to explain what I was, so I went into the full sex versus gender spiel.
		I explained about how sex refers to what genitals you have, while gender refers to your brain&apos;s configuration and your mind.
		I explained about how a man&apos;s brain and a woman&apos;s brain are structurally different, and how if you know enough about the human brain, you can tell the two apart when you look at them.
		I then moved on to transgendered people.
		I explained that when you look at their brains, they look like the brains that belong to their gender, not their sex, again showing a separation between sex and gender.
		I actually exaggerated that a bit too to make a point though.
		I didn&apos;t bring up the fact that the brain of a transgendered person is actually a mix, and while it looks more like the brain of someone of their gender than of the other gender, it does show some characteristics of cisgendered brains of people of their same sex.
		Transgendered people have mixed brains, just like the rest of us queers.
		The missionaries don&apos;t need to know that though, and if they care, they can do the research and learn for themselves.
		I then moved on to homosexuals.
		Gays and lesbians have mixed brains.
		They&apos;ve got enough brain structure from their sex to tell them that their gender matches, but enough brain structure of the opposite sex to tell them to be attracted to people of their own sex.
		And finally, I brought the topic to us non-binaries.
		We&apos;ve got mixed brains that don&apos;t allow out personalities to really be classified as either gender.
	</p>
	<p>
		The missionaries discussed something they call the &quot;natural man&quot; (read: &quot;man&quot; as in &quot;mankind&quot;, not &quot;man&quot; as in &quot;opposite gender of woman&quot;), and brought up lust as an example.
		Most of it was not relevant to much, it seemed, but part of it was about the carnal view of things.
		They talked about how lust is bad because it causes you to see people as pieces of meat, rather than as children of Elohim.
		That would become relevant later when I turned their example back at them.
		They also claimed that the natural man is the enemy of Elohim, so we discussed enemies for a bit.
		I said an enemy hurts you directly or indirectly.
		We can&apos;t hurt the gods directly, we simply don&apos;t have the power to.
		We can only hurt the gods by hurting each other, as hurting their children would likewise be grounds to call us their enemies.
		I also brought up that two consenting adults aren&apos;t hurting one another, so there&apos;s no harming the gods that way either.
	</p>
	<p>
		The missionaries stated that the reason there seems to be no place for non-binaries in the church, a concern I&apos;ve expressed multiple times, is that Elohim doesn&apos;t see anyone as non-binary.
		There are only the binary.
		You&apos;re a man or you&apos;re a woman.
		I expressed that there were two ways to look at that.
		Some people are clearly in the wrong bodies.
		If you call someone a man or woman based on their minds, there are no gays and lesbians.
		They marry according to their minds, and they seek out their own complement.
		They&apos;re a mix, and so are their partners.
		By whatever metric you use to put them in one category or the other, their partner is sure to fall into the other category, so they&apos;re a man and woman couple.
		On the other hand, if you call someone a man or woman based on their genitals, you&apos;re looking at them not as who they are inside, but as pieces of meat.
		Here&apos;s a male piece of meat, it should pair with a female piece of meat so they can mate.
		If you call someone a man or a woman based on their genitals, there&apos;s absolutely no way for you to avoid thinking of them as pieces of meat.
	</p>
	<p>
		One missionary talked about how they had several gay family members, and they didn&apos;t know why.
		They said that they needed to learn how to reconcile with Jesus.
		I interrupted, saying that they shouldn&apos;t even need to reconcile with Jesus.
		Their gayness isn&apos;t hurting anyone.
		There&apos;s no reason for Jesus to take offense to this.
	</p>
	<p>
		The missionaries claimed that in the eyes of Elohim, there&apos;s no such thing as homophobia, and there&apos;s also no such thing as the separation of sex and gender.
		I can see how they would get their view that sex and gender are intrinsically tied.
		It&apos;s a mistaken belief, but I can see where it comes from.
		But to claim that there&apos;s no such thing as homophobia while discriminating against homosexuals?
		That&apos;s just outright denial.
	</p>
	<p>
		They offered to give me a blessing.
		They want me to think it over and see if there&apos;s just one question I want an answer to.
		If I let them know, they&apos;ll prepare and ask me to prepare, then give me a blessing to help me find the answer.
		But what would I even ask at this point?
		Their gods are clearly not worth following, even if they were real.
		And all signs say they&apos;re not even that.
		They also made sure to remind me that the effect of a blessing is driven by the faith of the receiver.
		The more faith I have, the better the blessing will work.
		But they&apos;ve told me before that faith is a hope for that which we can&apos;t prove.
		How can I hope for these gods to even be real when they&apos;re clearly evil?
		Reading Genesis is enough to show their true nature, but even the Book of Mormon paints Jesus as despicable.
		I can&apos;t hope for his existence.
	</p>
</section>
<section id="Minetest">
	<h2>Minetest</h2>
	<p>
		I spent some time working on <code>minequest</code> after the missionaries left.
		Programming really helps me clear my head.
		Anyway, I got sort of an interface built, though I can&apos;t fully complete the interface until more of the underlying mechanics have been programmed.
	</p>
	<p>
		While testing things, I found that sand dropped from sandstone wasn&apos;t being counted.
		<code>minestats</code> has been unable to automatically detect it as a countable drop, so I&apos;ve needed to run specific code to get it counted, and I hadn&apos;t added that code to my testing environment.
		The stats from Minetest Game that can&apos;t automatically be detected bother me though.
		I can express in words why each stat should be counted as a stat, but programming the computer to see why isn&apos;t possible.
		There are simply things the $a[API] can&apos;t see.
		False positives are worse than false negatives, so <code>minestats</code> mostly errs on the side of caution, resulting in a few things not getting detected properly.
		But sand ...
		Today, it really seemed like sand drops should be something <code>minestats</code> should detect.
		And today, I also understood <strong>*why*</strong> it should be detectable.
		Sand is a bizarre element, the only element to date that is one of pure waste and pure destruction.
		You craft four sand into one sanstone, then when the sandstone is dug up, it turns into a single sand.
		Where did the other three sand go!?
		This is a countable stat because the change brought about by digging cannot be reversed.
		That&apos;s the same definition used to justify every single other stat I think should be countable too.
		For example, when you dig stone with iron, it turns into an iron lump and there&apos;s no way to convert the iron lump back into stone with iron.
		The quirk with sand though is that you can craft the dropped sand into more sandstone with other sand.
		Each time, you lose three fourths of what you put into it, so it&apos;s not reversible, but the chain of destruction can continue.
		So now, I&apos;ve added very primitive recipe awareness to the default stat detector.
		If an item drops a different number of the thing it was crafted from than it takes to craft it, that item&apos;s dropping will be counted as a stat.
		This means that, for example, if it took four sand to craft sandstone and sandstone dropped <strong>*five*</strong> sand, that&apos;d also be considered a countable stat, as you can&apos;t craft the five sand back into one sandstone.
		Again, the process is irreversible.
		This is also consistent with other things I&apos;ve deliberately programmed into the code that rules out drops that can be reversed via crafting.
		If the count is different, either higher or lower, it&apos;s a change and can thus be counted.
	</p>
	<p>
		So that&apos;s now one less thing the default stat-detector gets wrong in Minetest Game, and one less thing I have to account for in other mods.
		I look forward to getting to examine other problematic stats as they come up as well.
	</p>
</section>
<section id="drudgery">
	<h2>Drudgery</h2>
	<p>
		My discussion post for the day:
	</p>
	<blockquote>
		<img src="/img/CC_BY-SA_4.0/y.st./coursework/CS3306/grading.png" alt="Assignment-grading workflow" class="framed-centred-image" width="751" height="215"/>
		<p>
			For the sake of simplicity of the diagram, I&apos;ll ignore the fact that the professor speaks to us via the computer system asynchronously.
			In this diagram, the only time interaction id done with the computer is for entering or checking records.
		</p>
		<p>
			When a student submits a professor-graded assignment, such as the learning journal assignments, there are one of three outcomes.
			First, the professor may reject the assignment.
			This might happen, for example, if it was turned in late.
			Again, we don&apos;t have that problem at this school, because the computerise system won&apos;t even allow the submission of late work.
			Second, the professor may ask us to redo the assignment.
			I haven&apos;t had that happen here, but it the Web interface seems to imply that this is a very real possibility.
			This may happen if the student submitted the wrong assignment (I&apos;ve seen many students accidentally submit work for other courses) or if it was absolutely terrible and the professor feels we could do better.
			The third option is that the professor might grade the work.
			This is the most common situation.
		</p>
		<p>
			When this happens, the professor checks the rubric, and uses it to grade the assignment.
			Some liberties might be taken based on situation, but for the most part, the rubrics keep things fair.
			Once the grades are decided upon based on the quality of the work and how well it met the specifications laid out in the rubric, they enter the grades into the computer system for later calculation of the final grade for the course.
			If the system is even halfway decent, there should be a way for the student to check their own grades in the computer.
			This school allows that option by revisiting the page that explains the assignment.
		</p>
		<p>
			It&apos;s worth noting that a student may disagree with their grades and try to get them changed.
			In this case, it&apos;s almost like submitting the same assignment again, but with an added explanation of something.
			The professor doesn&apos;t have to change anything though, and can reject this second submission.
			No new paths need be added to account for this scenario.
		</p>
	</blockquote>
</section>
END
);
